Eli: Blab
(Blab: Three secrets they’re keeping.)
The old soldier takes a glance over his shoulder before he speaks.His green eyes track somewhere behind him, as if looking for eavesdroppers. There’s something a little too distant there - looking off into space, glancing back at the long expanse of the past as it stretches behind him. ‘Secrets,’ he’d been asked. Maybe an unlikely thing for a man who seems to live as simply and honestly as Sir Eillian Locke. Yet, after a moment, he turns back to speak. And the secrets come.
“When Stormshot died, we came back and told his wing commander that he’d gone out bravely and nobly, the way that a true Wildhammer should.” Even after being re acclimated into society, he seems a little reserved among strangers. The words coming out with a kind of uncertainty, almost a hesitance. “We said that he plummeted like a star into a battalion of demons and obliterated all of them. He didn’t. Well,” the knight shrugs. “He did. But he landed out on the far edge of the continent, where the soil starts to erode into the Nether. His gryphon died in the fall, but he didn’t. We had to fight our way through that battalion to try and get to him, but once we got there,we saw it was hopeless. He was down too far, too distant to reach. Only thing we could do was call down to him, really. So…we stayed. We camped there on the edge of Hellfire Peninsula and the end of everything for three days, talking to him until he didn’t talk back anymore. It was terrible. So when we got back, we told the story differently. We had enough horrors in this days before the Portal opened back up; we all did what we could to make it a little less.”
And in that vein, there are certainly details of the story that he leaves off in the telling. Doesn’t embellish in the way of a borne storyteller; gives it plain, the way it might have gone into a field report in Honor Hold all those years ago.
“Never cared much for flying anyways. Even less after that.”
'Three secrets,’ the request had been, though. The telling of one maybe making the others a little easier. It’s not as long a moment after that that he goes on.
“I gave succor to an enemy.” His lips twist in a wry smile. “It’s not acceptable, I guess, that kind of thing, but I don’t care. There’s a difference between someone who’ll do anything to kill you and someone on the enemy’s side who’s trying to do the same thing as you are: get through it with your head down. So.yes. It was a Horde diplomat, in Pandaria. A blood elf. Our mortar blew her ship out of the sky, and…look, nevermind how I found her. I should have brought her back to camp and I didn’t. She was injured; I found someone in country who agreed to take her in. I refuse to call it treason, however you want to cut it. She didn’t make it to wherever she was supposed to be going either way. She didn’t die hating all of the Alliance with her last breath. Pouring all of that into the Pandarian ground” The last remark is punctuated with the sharp lift of a silver eyebrow. As if inviting the listener to refute any of it. Even welcoming it, whether or not it comes.
“I guess that I didn’t report it when she came over to our camp on Draenor counts as another one. You know those SI:7 vultures would have loved to have a word or so with her, and I guess they’ll have some for me too if it gets out. Whatever, they want it so bad, they can come work for it. That’s not how you build trust with your people. I think we’ve all got better things to be doing anymore, anyways.”
With that, he takes another look behind him. Taking in the landscape of the Broken Isles behind him, some greenish plume of fel smoke in the distance. As if looking backwards into time.
